July 29th, 2016

The fourth book in the Frank Einstein series is hitting bookstore shelves on September 6, and I got a box of the lovely things in the mail this week. This time, the focus is on biology and evolution. Frank, Watson, and the robots are camping while doing their science thing and saving the world from T. Edison and his simian sidekick. Four down, two to go.

October 7th, 2015

I don’t enter many illustration awards competitions. So, consequently, I don’t win many illustration awards. And as an illustrator, I sure never thought I’d win an award from an audio magazine. So it was pretty neat the other day to get a package in the mail from AudioFile Magazine, which is a magazine about audio books.
There have been three books published in the Frank Einstein series, and each of them has a corresponding audio book. For each of these, I’ve trekked up to New York to a recording studio and recorded the robot parts from the books (Jon Scieszka reads the rest of the voices and the narration). I record these in character, with different inflections and personalities for the two robots, Klink and Klank, and then I take the resulting audio files and dress them up with some fun audio gear until they sound like robots. Or, like how I think robots should sound.
Fast forward a bit of time, and AudioFile magazine published a wonderful review of the first audiobook, Frank Einstein and the Anti-Matter Motor, and awarded us an “Earphone Award,” which even though it looks a lot like a certificate of participation that my kids get when their teams come in last place in sports, I’m very excited that the work got this recognition.

And lastly, if you read this far, you deserve to see this. Yes, I don’t just provide the voice of robots. I wear a giant robot head for video as well.

June 1st, 2015

August 19th, 2014

Today is publication day for Frank Einstein and the Antimatter Motor. This is the first book in the six-book Frank Einstein series, written by the lovely and talented Jon Scieszka and published by Amulet/Abrams. When a new book comes out, I always like to publish a post showing sketches and process. You might think this is more boring than canned peas. But I like it, and I know one other guy who does as well so at least there will be him reading.

I first learned about this book series back in the fall of 2012. Jon had just come up with the idea and was tossing ideas around. I worked up some sketches (seen below), and the next thing I knew, there was a contract and a deadline. As Jon wrote the first book over most of 2013, I completed work on Everything Goes and some other books, checking in every now and then and producing the odd sketch here and there.

I’d never worked on a book where the author had not yet finished the manuscript. This created a very different kind of process, where I was sketching covers that included characters that did not even end up in the final script, for example. We didn’t know what the characters should look like, and we didn’t know what personalities the robots had. At some points, the tall robot would be the erudite, smart guy, and the short robot would be the emotional goofball. Jon felt that this overlapped C3PO and R2D2 in Star Wars a bit much, so he went with the reverse in the end. In some ways, my early sketches influenced some of the characters and scenes in the book and it was pretty interesting to be part of the process so early. For this reason, these early sketches I’m posting here are different from early sketches of most of my projects. Interesting to note that on the cover sketch, the name of the book didn’t even exist yet. Jon went through several possible titles, some of which you’ll see in later sketches here.

(Click on the image to embiggen it and see it more better.)

The first sketch of Frank and the robots. It’s like looking at dinosaurs.

Early early cover design.

Klanks. Or are they Klinks?

Very early Klink. He became Klank.

early versions of Klink and Klank

Sketch of Frank used in the original proposal.

Robot Army?

We tried various directions as we contemplated the cover art. One of the suggestions from former teenage heart-throb Charlie Kochman, the editor of the series, was to consider an invention of some kind on the cover. Like something Rube Goldberg would design. I love Goldberg and this made a lot of sense to me immediately, but I had no idea how we’d pull it off, and the idea of “inventing” my own Goldberg was pretty daunting. Here are a few that show the invention idea just kind of dummied in, and then a batch of sketches that show a more action-packed cover that I thought was reminiscent of a movie poster.

We liked aspects of these, but I was having a hard time making them work. I really liked the movie-poster ones, but apparently no one else did!

Jon had suggested in various ways that the books might look like journals. Like something a scientist would carry around in their pocket to make notes and record observations. I knocked off this field-guide-looking version at some point, and Jon and I both loved it. There was no way that we’d ever get this to be “the cover” but it was an interesting place to start.

A Field Guide to Robots, apparently

Not knowing then that this was eventually going to be a dead-end street, I started digging up reference and inspiration for this kind of thing. Journals, science-fiction manuals, and especially old text books had such a great look to them. I felt that with the older crowd that we were shooting for here (as opposed to 3-5 year olds as we might be for a picture book) that we might be able to do something with this that had a retro-sophisticated spin.

Several directions came from this exploration. I loved the idea of breaking up the cover into these panels, where we could show various characters and scenes from the book, but also symbolize various scientific principles and ideas. They reminded me of comic-book panels, which I thought was perfect. I imagined they would be in three-color printing: black and two other colors. You can see that when the two colors overlap, they create a third.

Amazingly, we got a preliminary go-ahead on this direction with the caveat that there was one more meeting coming up where the concept had to pass muster. I kept my fingers crossed. Alas, it was a no-go. One never knows exactly who said what or how things went, but the general consensus that I understood was something along the lines of “oh my god, everyone hated this.” It was too subtle and esoteric for the kind of audience they were aiming at, and it was just too weird and busy. The problem now is that we were late late late with the cover, and marketing really needed something to work with. Chad, the art director of the project, went back to some early concepts that were more straightforward, more direct, simpler to understand, and simpler to execute. Sounds like a plan.
I’d designed this type treatment for the Frank Einstein title, which was a nice anchor.

Chad’s direction was something like “let’s just get the three main characters in the middle, doing something, and let’s put the type on the top.” It worked!

finally, something good!

Here’s a cleaner furthering of this idea.

Everybody loved it! They had no choice! We had to get this done! But everyone loved it anyway!

Closer….

Ironically, there were some issues with the title typography which Chad solved with the sleek sophisticated logotype below. As a small aside, this is the first book I’ve ever illustrated that I didn’t hand-letter the title. Just a little trivia for you there.

Chad’s type treatment

I designed this atomic-themed background pattern to replace the graph paper,

Chad put everything together into a crazy complicated Photoshop file, and voila! We have a cover.

Now that was easy, wasn’t it?

One of the cool, more subtle things about this cover (and the five remaining as well) is that it’s not just a scene of the characters “doing something.” We kept the Rube Goldberg-inspired riff, where the mechanics of the illustration are explained with text on the back cover. Here’s an example of a Goldberg cartoon:

Rube Goldberg

And here is the text as it was placed on the back cover of Frank Einstein.

I’m also posting a few interior illustrations and some of the early earliest sketches of the same scenes. Certain aspects of the book Jon had locked in from the beginning. Like the climactic confrontation at an old industrial site/factory/power plant. And the Frankenstein riff at the beginning. It’s weird to see the drawings here, created more than a year apart.

August 4th, 2014

Is Cartoon-tastic a word? It is now. The internet says so.

BookPage reviewed Frank Einstein and the Antimatter Motor today, and they published a “Behind the Book” feature where Jon and I discuss our favorite scenes from the book. We look handsome in our photos.

July 30th, 2014

A few weeks ago I was in New York for a few days doing Frank Einstein business. Two days were spent signing 12,000 copies of the Frank Einstein book. One day was spent reading the voices of Klink and Klank, the robot characters in Frank Einstein and the Antimatter Motor. Jon Scieszka, the book’s author, read the rest of the narration and dialog. After I read the voices at a recording studio in my regular old voice, I was given the resulting audio files and went to work with some of my audio gear to roboticize the lines. This was quite a process, and I’ve been anxious and excited to hear the actual results ever since.
This morning I noticed that the audio book was up for sale on Amazon, so I checked the Listening Library’s website to see if it was up there and voila there it was. Here’s the link to the Listening Library page, and below is the audio file.

Before going into the recording studio, I did some test-runs to give the various producers and author a sense of what I was thinking about for the voices. I ended up doing something completely different, as none of these were quite a legible as they needed to be.

July 28th, 2014

The mail-bot at the postal office done good today. One of the best days is the day where a real live copy of the book you’ve been going crazy working on (a year or six months ago) finally appears, and it’s bound and real and has a bar code and an ISBN and the ink smells funny and the colors look correct and they spelled your name right. That’s what this is all about.*